


Desert Skies and Impermanence

by silver-shock (DrowningInStarlight)



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Ficlet, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-10-13 22:10:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17496314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrowningInStarlight/pseuds/silver-shock
Summary: The desert is a strange, distorted thing.





	Desert Skies and Impermanence

Nothing ever changes in Battery City. There's always the same view from your window, the same glassy eyed people surrounding you. _Smile_ , they tell you, so you do. You smile until your face aches. The pain is the only thing that feels real. 

Nothing changes in Battery City, nothing is _allowed_ to change. 

One day, the windows in the house opposite you go dark. There's crack in one of the panes, you see, covered over roughly with black tape. There's a stamp on the door, _Reclaimed by Better Living Industries._ You can see something bright through the uncracked window, it could be blood but it's probably just paint. You didn't know your neighbours well. They had a child, you think, perhaps two years old-- you don't really remember. You never asked. You don't ask now. Part of you is still frozen, a deer under glaring headlights, and the other part of you just really, really doesn't want to know. 

Paint, you tell yourself. Just paint. 

(You know there's no paint in Battery City. Nothing ever changes.) 

 

The desert is a strange, distorted thing. Things change here, change at the pace of your frantic heartbeat, the heartbeat that tells you _I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm alive._ It takes you a long time to slow down. Eventually, you stop under the shadow of a palm tree in Zone Six. The sand is cool and serene, the sky a shade of sunset blue that you'd only dreamed about in Batt City. You fall asleep to the crackle of your fire and the whisper of the wind over the dunes. 

When you wake up, you don't recognise where you are. This isn't where you camped last night, but the ashes of your fire are beside you, the sky still the most beautiful thing you never thought you'd see. There's no palm tree. Perhaps there never was a palm tree. What were you doing here again? 

Sometimes it takes two hours to drive across the edge of Zone Five. Sometimes it takes three times that. Killjoys stock up on fuel, and pray to the Phoenix Witch to lead them home. 

You ask people why the desert seems to reconstruct itself around your very feet, but people look uncomfortable, shrug the questions off. Maybe they can smell the city air that still stains your lungs like tar, or maybe they don't know, or maybe-- this thought hits you last-- they don't _care._

You care. It makes you feel lost, off balance. You stumble through unfamiliar sands, tripping over memories of places that no longer exist as you knew them. You care a _lot._

Someone eventually takes pity on you. It's Doctor Death Defying, ever a friend to the 'joys so new they don't even have a name, and he leads you into his broadcast booth and tells you about the way the sands shift. Nothing's permanent out here, he says, but nothing's permanent _anywhere._ The desert is just never pretends to be anything except exactly what it is. Sand shifts as the wind carries it, as it fills your boots and you carry it with you. The desert is shaped by us, and by bigger things than us. 

You must look scared, because he says don't worry, sunshine. You'll never be left behind. Just because you don't know the desert doesn't mean it won't know _you._


End file.
